The first time I accessed the internet that I can remember had to be in the fourth grade. I remember because it was my very first research assignment. Before this point in time, I had only used our very large, clunky desktop computer to play games such as solitare. Anyway, my fourth grade teacher was named Miss Soleki and our class was chosen to do the spring play that year. I remember it was she who gave each of us our roles within the play and I was tasked with bringing Martin Luther King Jr. back to life. I wonder why she gave me such a part in an all white class, besides myself of course. I suppose I'll never know. ;) So with my topic I was set to go. This was the assignment that shaped my entire scholastic career from then until now. I discovered that writing came easy to me; the more ideas that flowed into my head from my research led to an extremely long paper for a ten-year-old. If I recall correctly that paper was twelve pages. Single spaced. From that point on many of my teachers and professors came to know me as an overachiever when it came to writing. The research was also something that seemed to come quite easily to me, which I remember feeling greatful for. I can remeber my mom coming into the room in which we kept our computer with a dinner plate piled with food and I can remeber her astonishment at how much I had written. It was something that
stuck with the two of us as I can remeber being a freshman in high school and proof-reading my mom's work for her job. And so, I suppose I can say wholeheartedly that my first encounter with the internet was one of extreme positivity. But now this has me thinking, if I was born in a different time by even a few years or an earlier generation perhaps, would I have been as adept as I was initially using the internet? Could it be that being born and raised within this period of technological advancements is what made it possible for me to grasp it so easily. The only reason I think this easy is due to my past experience with people of earlier generations constantly asking questions about technology and especially of the internet. People such as my late grandfather and some of my customers in the electronics department at Target where I work, truly make me question this notion. It seems that no matter how hard you try to teach them, the full capabilities of technology and the internet are lost and only available to the later generations. This entire topic has peaked my interest for quite some time. However, at this point I should think it's fairly obvious that I have strayed from my initial topic which could be attributed to my desire to write, which isn't always apparent to me, but hey that's okay.
